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‘I’d Rather Fight Them Over There Than Here’

“I’d rather fight them over there than here.” This is one of those sayings designed to garner the support of Americans for the government’s 21st century wars.

Let’s see what’s wrong with this slogan, which, on the surface, sounds plausible..

In the runup to the U.S. attack on Iraq in March of 2003, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice kept repeating “weapons of mass destruction.” This was to arouse your fears and short-circuit your rational thought. To demonize Saddam Hussein and link him to 9/11, they spoke of his “arsenal of terror.” They wanted to scare you into supporting an attack on Iraq.

Come 2011 and Obama calls forth visions of “massacre” in Benghazi. or “protecting civilians” so that you will support his and NATO’s war in Libya.

In the same class of propaganda as these examples is “I’d rather fight them over there than here.”

Rumsfeld, Rice and Bush all pushed this line repeatedly in 2006 and earlier.

Let’s not accept this saying at face value. Let’s ask who is the “them” and where is the “there”? You may have been thinking that the government was after terrorists. Maybe, but it seems to have other objectives guiding its foreign wars.

The U.S. government made the Iraqis and the Taliban the “them” and made Iraq and all of Afghanistan the “there.” The terrorism in those countries rose sharply. On one reading, the U.S. government is so dumb that it cannot even identify terrorists and their precise location, even with huge amounts allocated to the CIA. On another reading, the government has made these wars for geopolitical reasons that have little to do with terrorism. On a third reading, the government has been led into these wars by various interest groups. These three readings are not mutually exclusive. All three may apply.